


The Speedrunner's Guidebook

by Brickman



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Replay Value AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-28
Updated: 2012-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 05:54:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brickman/pseuds/Brickman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Against his will, brickMan is forced to upload a guidebook from that most vile species of Sburb player ever created: The speedrunner. But he doesn't have to like it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Plea to Not Read This Guide

**Author's Note:**

> Written in the same universe as the [Sburb Glitch FAQ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/340777/chapters/551606) by GodsGiftToGrinds. The Guide is awesome and you should totally read it, even if it contains questions in *maybe* half it's chapters. And he adamantly refuses to capitalize it "sBurb". This is ultimately going to be way too long to be a "Guest Chapter" but oh well.

Hey everyone, brickMan here. If you don't know me, I'm a native Sylph of Heart and my friends tell me I'm rather outspoken about it, which to me just means I'm doing a half-decent job as a sylph. And yes, I am aware of the glitch that causes my username to appear capitalized wrong half the time; deal with it.

I would like to open this by apologizing to everyone for what I am about to do. No, I would *like* to open by finding some way not to have to post this here, but that isn't going to happen. There are no outs here. So I'm going to have to settle for apologizing.

Ok, so I am not posting this guide of my own free will. To make a long story short, my current session contained a guy by the name of stopwatchRendevous, who had the great fortune of rolling Sage of Law. He was working on this guide and he wanted to make sure that if he croaked it'd see the light of day. So he picked me, apparently at random, and handed me a couple of the most air-tight Sentences you have ever laid eyes upon. I have to upload this to PrototypeTowers, which is of course famous for its "no edits no take-downs" policy. I can't cut anything out or change a single word of text. I can't try to sabotage or corrupt it. And oh yeah, I can't tell anyone the rest of the rules and can't ask for help finding loopholes. If you have any bright ideas, please keep them to yourself so I don't fall over dead reading the comments.

About the only thing I CAN do is warn, no, BEG you not to do the things described in this guide. This is a bad road, people, and you are going to get people hurt or killed going down it. Probably both. But I guess I can't put it off forever, so I begrudgingly present to you, the readers:

 

 

 

  
**The Speedrunner's Guidebook**  
by stopwatchRendevous

 

 

And no I am not obligated to give him that fancy title page he drew. Not even that admittedly-cool drawing of an hourglass.


	2. The Aspects: Part 1

**Section 1: The Aspects**

The first thing to know when speedrunning Sburb is that every session is different. This sounds obvious because it is. A sburb session is customized to the players, has many random elements, is full of glitches, and has one malicious semi-omnipotent boss per player at the end of the first arc anyways. But while every run takes some improvisation and will have some surprises for you, the biggest source of differences between sessions is also the most predictable: The assignment of aspects and titles. To put it bluntly, some are more useful than others, both to have and to be. When approaching the game as a speedrunner, this is doubly true. Knowing not just what to expect but what to *do* with each is of vital importance. Since aspects are generally much more flexible than Titles, I will go over each aspect in detail but only briefly touch on titles--there's really not much you can do with a Ward to speed things up or a Prince that will slow them down.

<Hey there, brickMan here! So, when I said I couldn't do anything but warn you against reading this guide that wasn't quite true. I can also add warnings *within* the guide. Oops, bit of an oversight there Stopwatch! From this point on, anything in **Blue** text is me. Anything in  **Black** text is stopwatchRendevous, and anything in other colors is not gonna happen because honestly this guy is lucky I'm even bolding the section headers for him. Expect me to drop in and add in protests and counter-advice in various places as I transcribe this thing. >

***Heart***

Heart is, far and away, the most valuable aspect in a speedrunning session, both to be and to have available. <Oh god no. This cannot be good.> The game is absolutely filled with obstacles tied to your mental state and personal development rather than mere force of arms, and Heart can be used to cheat almost all of them (with the exception of the Denizen's infamous "No cheating!" mode). Maturity quests can be breezed through with ease, and the resulting "maturity" can be kept or discarded at your discretion. The Nightmare Heir literally copies your shiny every time you fight it, leading to fantastic exploits for the creative. On top of that, it can be used to "hack" most NPCs and even a few useful game objects (though most of those are extremely dangerous to play with even for experienced native heart aspects). <That part, at least, he got right. Never once heard of a guy hacking his alchemiter and then living to the end of his session.>

Of course, that's not the use makes Heart so famous. Speedrunners often have to deal with rather extreme knee-jerk negative reactions from other players <Gee I wonder why?> upon learning of their hobby. Often this can turn into a physical, even bloody, fight. If you or a compatriot are gifted with Heart, though, you can mostly rest easy on the politics front for the rest of the session. Most players are completely unwilling to stand up to a Heart player, at least directly, and with good reason--Heart provides the most reliable nonlethal means of semi-permanently stopping an opponent in the game, if not the most reliable method of nonviolent conflict resolution period. If things truly come to a head and you're playing as Heart, you can safely expect to make it the remainder of your session without the same things coming to a head a second time, period. Half the time if you play it smart the other guy is more likely to survive to the end than he would've

<AUGH I can't take it anymore! You, stopwatchRendevous, are beyond a doubt the worst kind of player. The kind that gives other people a bad name just for having gotten handed the same aspect as you. Using Heart to win arguments is about the third-most despicable use I have ever heard of for the aspect, and to hear you sitting here not just bragging about it but encouraging others to do it to (hell, even trying to justify it) makes my blood boil. Heart is an aspect with powerful abilities to help, both in a crisis and in one's preplanned self-advancement, but you'd never know it for all the people who are scared shitless that you're going to steal men's souls and make them your slaves whenever it's convenient for you.>

been if you had done nothing anyways. Just be careful of players who will try to escalate things to real violence before you can pacify them, *because* they know you can pacify them.

If you have a Heart player, make sure you're on his or her good side. If you do NOT have a heart player in your session, you can probably double the expected time it'll take to finish your session (unless you have Rage, which is a reasonably good substitute--see below). Although I'm not of the camp that "calls" the length of a session before it starts, it's generally accepted practice for those who do to call two separate times, one for if the session has a Heart player and one for if it doesn't. <Oh is *that* what they do? I thought their need to win by a certain date was just completely arbitrary, and I guess I was right after all!>

Be certain to keep your heart player alive at all costs. Aside from the sheer utility, it will be much more difficult to *undo* anything the heart player does if he dies. <No fucking kidding. Here's an even better idea: Don't fuck with people's shinies in the first place unless they asked you to!> Most modifications fade eventually but there are often complications if nonpermanent shiny alterations are still present when you leave a session for the next (certain replayers, most notably jetstreamJester, have been known to intentionally abuse this to manipulate what class they get in the next session). <And on what I'm sure is a *completely* unrelated note I would like to offer condolences to jetstreamJester's friends on her recent demise. Assuming speedrunners have friends.>

***Rage***

<You know what? No. I'm sorry; I just can't do any more of this tonight. I guess that's one more liberty he forgot to forbid me here; splitting up what was supposed to be one chapter into several. Hey, maybe if I rant enough I'll drown out the original guide in my text! And then maybe the chains will solidify and my head will pop off of my neck and yeah I'd better just keep it in check.>


	3. The Aspects: Part 2

<Ok I've calmed down now. I know that as horrible as replayers are, it's unlikely that anything he says from this point on is actually going to upset me as much as his views on Heart did. So let's get this over with.>

<In any case I think we were at  ***Rage*** now. Let's see how he violates the basic principles of my sister aspect. >

Rage, being the paired aspect to Heart, is useful for a lot of the same things, only to differing degrees. In many cases you can just think of Rage as being a less powerful but safer version of Heart. Raged game abstractions are less likely to prove disastrous than Shiny-hacked ones (and often easier to make do whatever it is you wanted anyways; Rage is almost strictly better against inanimate objects). Raged-at players will generally be just as pliable as shiny-modded ones, but the range of emotions you can force them into is much narrower and the effects are both resistible and very short-term. Still, for most maturity-cheating purposes the effect only needs to last a few seconds and safely using Rage for these purposes is MUCH easier than Heart; Rage is pretty much safe to use for emotional modifications as soon as you know how to do it, while Heart requires copious training. Used on minor enemies Rage is almost strictly better than Heart, since the effect will generally last more than as long as you needed and can be applied from a greater range and as an area effect. It will fail on major enemies though, including even the most trivial of bosses.

<Really? Rage is "a less powerful but safer version of Heart?" Has he ever actually *played* Rage? Because take it from someone who's been both, that analysis has all the subtlety and accuracy of saying that red is a "less bright" version of orange.>

***Flow***  
Flow is the aspect which is most obviously applicable to a speedrun, and in practice it doesn't disappoint. However, it is not all it's cracked up to be. Flow does have many abilities useful for speedrunning or powerleveling, but it lacks anything that can be used to outright gamebreak. The abilities seem to have been mostly designed with the assumption that you'd be using them to speedrun, so there are defenses against anything really exploit-worthy. The main advantage of rolling Flow while speedrunning is that you will have an absolutely enormous roleplay coefficient no matter what else you can do. That goes a long way towards compensating for any underleveledness in the party during the final stretches of the game. See the later chapter "Winning Without Grinding" for more on this.

Another nice aspect of this aspect is that Flow coplayers can usually be convinced to go along with your plans to speedrun even if they would normally be against it, and if you are Flow you have an automatic and difficult-to-refute defense for your decision to speedrun.

<Is it me or does anyone else get the impression that stopwatchRendevous does not actually know the names of, like, any abilities? Nor could he be arsed to look any up when writing his guide. I'd bet a hundred boonbucks that we're going to get through at least three more aspects without a single ability name being but to paper.>

***Rhyme***  
Yes, you're going to get Rhyme at least once if you make a habit out of speedrunning. It really is the exact opposite of Flow. Abilities that stop enemies dead in their tracks or practically eliminate spawning in late-game areas, but if you even try to do things too fast your roleplay coefficient will be too low to get off even your basic attacks. Your coplayers will probably even assign whoever has the best psybuffs the duty of talking you out of speedrunning. Pretty much your choices here are Vagabouncy and just accepting it and taking the session off from speedrunning. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing every once in a while. Sometimes the game tries to give you a hint and you're better off just humoring it.

<Ok, now I know for sure I'm gonna win my bet. He just referred to specific Rhyme abilities there but doesn't know what they were called. And I know for a fact he had Rhyme last session! What made this guy think he's qualified to write a guide on anything?>

***Law***   
<Ok, so he left this one blank. Still working on it? Whatever, doesn't count towards my bet.>

***Light***  
Light can be extremely useful for speedrunning. It's basically the aspect of being able to take risks and not get your ass handed to you for it. Light will help you in most everything you do, and the constant rushing-in that your speedrunning encourages is close enough to the playstyle the Shine likes that it'll usually let you slide. The best part about Light, though, is that with many titles you can transfer most of the important bonuses it grants onto another player, freely, without even sacrificing much of it yourself. You may even get an ARC bonus. You should be present and light-buffing people before just about every major event in their progression and any dungeon they suspect will be difficult.

<Haha seriously dude do you know what any abilities are called at all? You should at least know this for the aspects you've played.>

***Void***   
_Note: Talk to Void players to complete this section. Guest section? I'm sure there's a lot of great stuff you can do with a Void player if you get one._

<You cannot be serious. I would be doing you a favor if I just skipped to the end of the aspects and saved you the embarrassment. BUT I CAN'T!>

***Mist***  
Mist is a godsend in a speedrun, make no mistake. Normally one of your biggest restricting factors is that each player can only be in one place, and only can use a given person's powers in one place. Well, Mist fixes that. It's like another copy of all your best aspects at once, plus a bunch of handy identity glitches that let you bring those abilities to bear in situations that are supposed to restrict you to a specific player or double your firepower in solo dungeons. And if your Mist player is a slowpoke you can do her dungeons for her, and if your other players are slowpokes the Mist player can do THEIR quests instead. And if one of your sessions' aspects is attached to an unfortunate title your Mist player means you can still get what you want out of it. And of course

The possibilities with Mist, as always, are endless. Just be careful not to completely break any important scripts, because it can sometimes take days trying to figure out how to unstick things. Also, do read one of those guides that lists abilities that are and aren't safe to duplicate. Fogged Rainclones are never worth it.

<Ok, I won't actually fault him for not referring to [Dord Waltz] and [Smoke and Mirror] by name because honestly, who does? Those two abilities are pretty much the entire aspect. Also it looks like he at least spent more than five minutes thinking of uses for Mist before writing this section. Maybe.>

<He loses those points by not only not knowing the name of the skill for making Dupliclones but forgetting the proper term for the clones!>

<Alright enough of this.>

<It seems that making fun of him is quite therapeutic and actually makes the task of transcribing this blight upon paradox-space enjoyable. Who would have guessed? Still, I think that's enough for now. I think I'll be able to finish the aspects (that he got to) in the next post. Side note, not that I *don't* want people alternatingly laughing at him and navigating away in disgust, but I peeked ahead and this guide does get a bit more thorough and coherent once he's done with the aspects. It might just be that he wasn't done with this part yet.>


	4. The Aspects: Part 3

<Alright, I'm gonna finish off the rest of the aspects in one go. It's not like he actually got to all them.>

***Dream***  
Dream is a fairly good aspect for speedrunning. First off, Dream is extremely versatile. You can do just about anything once, so if there's *anything* you can think of that'd help with sequence breaking, you can do it. It's generally considered bad form to suggest specific tricks for Dream, but I've seen Dream players who could solo the Black King or finish whole the Taking of the Heart in less than a day.

Conversely, speedrunning can actually be a good thing for a Dream player. While in theory you're supposed to become infinitely creative and come up with a million different ways to do everything, a lot of players (especially the types likely to be handed Dream but who aren't its natives) have trouble with staying power. You start the game with so many good ideas, and then as it goes on you use them up far faster than you can come up with good ones. The faster the session ends, the less burnout you will suffer from and the less likely you will be to have to waste the plans you ought to be using in the endgame too early. Struggling Dream players are the only ones for whom I would suggest completing a "Basic" speedrun session; see the chapter "How Long is a Session?" for more on that.

<I wish I could argue that this was a bad strategy here, but it isn't. If you're a Dream player and you want to boost your chances of survival at the expense of everyone else on the entire team, I can think of worse plans than forcing a quick end to the session.>

***Rain***  
It doesn't take a genius to figure out how rain is useful for speedrunning. Dupliclones let you complete quests at several times the normal rate, and if you need them all together to knock over something dangerous their self-buffs tend to bleed over and help the others. You can also break a lot of game scripts if you get your ARC high enough, but that's usually accomplished by spending so much extra time on Maturity Quests that it isn't worth it.

The more interesting thing to worry about with Rain is staying on-task. Generally, the madness Rain players get keeps their goals from before they went mad but causes them to go about it in insane ways. So if you are Rain you will probably still be trying to pursue a speedrun, you'll just look nuts while doing in. <Only when you're Rain?> If your coplayer is Rain, though, you pretty much just have to hope that they stay on-target because directing their actions will be almost impossible. Rain players will do what they want and you just have to trust that it'll usually turn out to be in the team's best interest.

<So I have nothing to say really. The amount that this guy pisses me off is pretty much directly proportional to how specific his suggestions are, and he just spent two paragraphs saying nothing new.>

***Mind***  
I have no experience with speedrunning while Mind, nor does anyone I've talked to. For some reason it seems to be given to dedicated speedrunners very rarely. One of the big theories on the boards out there is that because we're already asserting our sense of choice in how we play the session, we're less likely to feel adrift on the waves of Paradox Space or something. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter, except in that there's not much point trying to outline what to do if you *are* mind.

When dealing with Mind coplayers, though, you are on very thin ice. Your interactions with the Mind player should be structured entirely around the goal of not making yourself into their special project. If they do take too much of an interest in you, try to make you give up on speedrunning (not necessarily just for the current session either; they'll often try to get some kind of vaguely-binding agreement to give it up permanently), and are rejected, you've just set up all the necessary conditions for their berserk trigger, and you will be the target of the aftermath (whether it happens or not varies depending on the Mind player). If you lie and then do it anyways, then the trigger is basically guaranteed, except you won't know when it happens, which is worse.

If the ability does trigger, there's no guarantee that they'll come after you but it's safer to assume they will. If you have a way of physically restraining them quickly, do so, but be warned that they could wake up at any time from the initial comatose period when the ability activates and you do not want to be in the middle of tying them up; knocking them out by more direct means is a good idea if it can be done safely. If not, just find somewhere to hide and alert the other players; even if they aren't knocked out the initial rage will give way to a sobfest after an hour or two of frantically searching for you.

<How fitting that the entire entry ends up being about how not to piss off your coplayers enough to kill you, with the strong implication that this is a mammoth feat on part with beating the Black King blindfolded. None of this seems like some kind of hint to you about whether you should be acting this way, stopwatch?>

***Fate***  
Fate is an extremely easy aspect to speedrun with. As long as you have a clear goal in mind, The Faith will tell you exactly what to do to get there. If your clear goal is "Beating the game within X weeks", and you've chosen a timeframe which is actually possible given the details of your session, the only way you are likely to fail is if you don't do what they say. Just be careful that what you tell yourself you want is what you really want.

<Better yet, why not set yourself the goal of "not having anyone die"? Then you could almost pretend to be a decent human being instead of a horrid backstabbing speedrunner.>

***Hope***  
Hope is an interesting aspect to speedrun with. The obvious gem is **[Hope Rides Alone]** , which makes you considerably more independent than other aspects. This makes you more capable of pushing the session forward even without help. Don't be fooled though. Roleplaying treats NPCs allies the same as other players, so you can just as easily grab a consort or two and be independent without Hope, and more durable allies don't all have long quest chains to reach them.

More interesting are is the rest of the ability list. Hope has a lot of abilities that are broken in the bad sense of the word, but it has the best low-level offensive spell in the game. **[Eject]** gives you the kind of offensive power you need in the endgame almost right from the start, with no grinding required and very little damage scaling. The Pluck requirement is also so low you can ignore it even at low levels. Even if you land a pure combat class this ability is going to carry you.

The other important ability is **[Light Up The Night]**. Why? Because if you do set a target date on the session, it will literally become more powerful the closer you get to that date. The power curve will be wonky though, since it'll suddenly stop helping you if it looks like you are going to succeed. This almost certainly includes the Reckoning, since by that point you will almost certainly know for sure if you've hit your goal or not.

<I am flabbergasted. Three actual ability names? I'd given up on him even knowing one! Also, some actual advice this time, which is itself a surprise after all the waffling above.>

<Anyways, that turns out to be as far as he got into the list of aspects. Next up: Actual gameplay! Just kidding, the next chapter is more theory. I would've expected a speedrunner to jump right to the point but I guess not.>


	5. How Long Should I Expect My Session to Be?

Or to answer the question you're probably *really* asking, "What Constitutes a Session?" The answer, of course, is vague for the same reason you're asking it in the first place: Sburb gives you more than one option. Technically speaking, you can beat the game "correctly" with a healthy and happy Genesis Frog as soon as everyone's completed their Denizen questline. Everything after that point is "optional" content. Often useful, arguably raises your chances of surviving the reckoning, but "optional".

So there are generally two schools of thought for what should be done in a speedrun session. You can either do a "Basic" session, in which you force the reckoning as soon as you know that you have a satisfactory frog and everyone's beaten their Denizen, or a "Full" session, in which you also defeat the Nightmare Heir and complete the Taking of the Heart. Which basically requires completing the entire main plotline. The Dream quests, and honestly just about anything you do while asleep, is universally considered irrelevant, except as needed to keep the agents from stabbing your dreamselves (assuming you don't forcetier early on). In any case, when measuring game time generally only the subjective length of the Alpha timeline is considered. That means getting a lift from your time player back to the start of the session won't help you, but grinding for months in a doomed offshoot to shave a week off your time in the Alpha is legal (though considered bad form for obvious reasons).

<I... do you realize what this means? Do you? It means there are enough speedrunners that they can have schisms within their own community. The horror!>

There are proponents for each variety, and of course both have arguments for why they're right. Really, though, it's not considered a very big deal. There WAS this theory some of the Sages had that if you don't complete the Taking of the Heart it'll leech energy away from the Genesis Frog after you win or something like that, but they supposedly debunked it about seven timestamps ago as of this writing. <You fool! PrototypeTowers doesn't have fully linear timetrav encryption! You may've just doomed any speedrun theorists who try to read your crappy guide too early to branch timelines! Ok not really, more likely you just gave someone the idea of testing that theory on the date you remember reading about them testing it on. But damn if that mental image didn't make me smile.> So unless you're Dream it's more a matter of preference than anything else. Doing a full run makes the game longer and thus adds both more opportunities to die and more plot points that can cause mental trauma, but you'll also enter the endgame at a higher level and with better gear and abilities so it's pretty much a wash in terms of danger in the long run. <You wanna know what *isn't* a wash when compared to those two options? No, go on, guess.>

Personally, I always go for Full runs unless I've got a struggling Dream player to worry about. I see no reason to repeat what is, in my opinion, the least-fun part of the game back to back for the rest of my life. Besides, if you're missing out on half the game's content, why are you even playing? (Don't say "because we don't have a choice". Once upon a time you really did willingly stick that disk in your computer, and maybe one in ten of you knew it was more than a videogame).

<So, is it me, or is it pretty darn hypocritical for the speedrunner to talk about skipping through the game while missing half the content? Does he just get antsy when he has the same kind of quest in front of him for three consecutive days?>

Anyways, returning to the original question, the absolute record for shortest Full session is 43 days, achieved by a six-person session led by speedrunner legend verticalVelocity. <Never heard of her.> The session only missed the six-week target date she set at the beginning by twenty-one minutes, as the battle with the Black King was delayed by an unexpected maneuver by a platoon of black chesspieces and then ran long anyways. <I'm sure she was really broken up about having missed her arbitrary target.> A more reasonable target to aim for is three or four months, which is fairly short but should be obtainable with most party compositions.

The shortest recorded Basic session is nine days, in a four-person session led by jetstreamJester <May she rest in little tiny shreds.> It is possible that there have been shorter, though, considering all the reports of people who don't know about the replayer community and also never found any of the content after the Denizen, and also because time on these runs is much more variable. Your time is dependent almost entirely on how quickly you and your coplayers can come to terms with your Denizens. Do not be surprised if some runs take two whole months to complete; there's no accounting for some coplayers.

Anyways, on to the wholly unethical stuff. There are certain things that are simply not done within the speedrunner community, and if you are ever caught doing one of the following and the accusation is Seer- or Sage-verified you can expect an immediate banning from the official boards and a blanking of all your records, and to generally be put on the shit-list.

  * Intentionally getting a coplayer perma-killed because he or she was taking too long with certain quests (most likely the Denizen). Yes, it does have to be proven, but no you are not as sneaky as you think.
  * Prototyping anything relating to Time (the aspect) or time manipulation in general. This really serves no useful purpose except to mess up your scorekeeping, so just don't do it!
  * Trying to end the session without completing the Denizen questline (including at least the most basic steps of the frogbreeding). Technically possible, but you will cripple your genesis frog. Which is, do remember, also an entire universe full of real people. And since the boards are maintained by a Smith of Space who originally wanted to ensure the creation of as many Genesis Frogs as possible...



On the last one, remember that you are not going to impress anyone by disobeying the ground rules. We keep records for Basic runs and Full runs, not fucked-up half-runs. If you do not properly complete the Denizen quests you have not "beaten" the game, reckoning or no. Though if we *were* keeping those records, you probably wouldn't impress anyone anyways, because that dubious honor belongs to spacetimeCounselor and his infamous less-than-48-hours session. And if I ever do have the fortune of meeting old Benedict in one of my sessions, I intend to personally introduce to him some small fraction of the horrors which must be going on in the universe represented by that poor, diseased little frog.

<Haha Ben are you reading this? Apparently you're now officially so bad that the speedrunners think you've crossed the line! I am laughing so hard I'm at risk of passing out from lack of oxygen.>

<Seriously, though, I love how apparently the list of actual rules that the speedrunners obey is split fifty-fifty between the slightest inklings of a moral compass and things that would make it harder to keep score. Have I mentioned recently how much I hate you guys? Because I hate you guys.>

<Anyways, that's the chapter. Up next: Maturity Quests! Actual gameplay, only for real this time.>


	6. Maturity Quests

The first segment of the game is, by far, the most mentally taxing to navigate. That is because while all of your challenges will be in some way built around your own strengths and weaknesses, the Terraforming is *about* your mental state. Which makes all the mindgames much worse. Not to mention, of course, the fact that this is the segment during which the game will be actively applying changes to your personality, as opposed to the much more passive demands the roleplay system makes on you for the rest of the game. And you *also* have to weigh into the balance massive shifts in your ARC that will follow you for the rest of the game. So if you don't want to cripple yourself for the rest of the session, you have to not only find and complete the quests but also manipulate which ones you complete to get the desired effect.

The first step in navigating your maturity quests is to know as much about them as possible. The currently definitive guide on maturity quests is, sadly, [the one written by SpacetimeCounselor](http://archiveofourown.org/works/481546), so you had best familiarize yourself with it before continuing. <Yeah, being honest, Ben can occasionally get his act together and crank out something legitimately useful. Ben, assuming you read this, you should spend more time writing guides and less time trying to hack the servers.>

Finished reading that? Good. Now, hopefully while reading that a few of the streets jumped out at you as being likely to apply to you. If you need a nudge, "which one would I least like to have" is a good rule-of-thumb for the inexperienced. You might still get some form other areas, but most of the quests will be focused on your "problem areas" and that's also where the ones that boost you on the path towards completing the Sarabande will be. Your goal, by the way, is probably to just complete the song and move on, but not necessarily. Certain roles will be able to get enough of an ARC boost out of maturity quests to make it preferable to actual level grinding, though you'd also best make sure that the effect the quest has on your personality is suitably inoffensive. Rain or Sand aspects and Displacement classes are the obvious choice here, but certain others can do it, especially if you make heavy use of a specific skill which they boost.

<...>

<*Preferable* to level grinding? Did he seriously just suggest that you should be able to coast through the game on either one of your level *or* your ARC? I can't be reading that right. There's no way he would have lasted more than two sessions if that's what he meant.>

So you probably know which maturity quests you're likely to receive the most of, and of those which ones you want to do and which you should desperately try to avoid, not to mention which outcome you wish to pursue in each kind of quest. Now it's time for the hard part: The subtle art of influencing which maturity quests you get. This takes practice, because mostly your only way to influence it is with your mental state when you talk to the quest giver. And even then, it's weighted so you're less likely to get a quest you've already done several times in order to ensure you complete a more “well-rounded” set of maturity quests. But it can be influenced a great deal with practice.

Still, you're probably going to get the quests you don't want once or twice. It's just too difficult to avoid. Pride, especially, should be treated as extremely hazardous--a single badly-failed Pride quest might well shut down your attempts at a speedrun. When presented with a quest you don't want, you pretty much have three options: Try to force one of the notorious "Embrace this" win-conditions (like [Harleboss] or [I Love Rogue]), try to avoid completing the quest at all, or intentionally fail it.

The first option is risky for the fairly obvious reason that you might *not* be able to force the game to acknowledge you, and if you fail you'll probably trigger an outcome you didn't want on accident (for example, [Exhaustivity] after failing on a Pride quest). And it might assume you didn't learn your lesson and give you the same quest again to be sure. Succeeding is itself risky, because it might push you past the level of what is actually safe--I've seen players who forced too many "successes" in a pride quest turn into glorified PKers, and players who got [Afraid of the Darko] more than once in a session barricade themselves in their room with an alchemiter for food. <Someday you will learn that you're ALREADY past the levels that are safe. Or at least, you would if you weren't dead. Does that count?> In general, two is the absolute maximum for the number of times you should be willing to complete one of these in the same session, and one is safer.

The second option, refusing to complete the quest, is not always available. Many, though far from all, maturity quests are flexible enough that just about anything you choose to do, even turning around and walking the other way, counts as an answer. You also may need to find another questgiver as the consort who gave you the quest usually won't say anything unrelated to that quest until you complete it. Still, there's more than one elder consort out there. If you can figure out that you goofed and got assigned a quest you didn't want before you get to the place where the consort told you to go, you should be able to skip it by just avoiding that place for a while--eventually the game will just close the quest out and both the NPC and the place become usable again. That "eventually" is measured in game progress, not days. Generally all open maturity quests are canceled when you complete the Slaying of the Beast or defeat the Nightmare Heir. <That... actually explains a great deal. Assuming it's true. Ok fine it probably is true. He’s allowed to know more than me about *something*.>

The third option is the official game-endorsed response to having a maturity quest you don't want to complete, so for the most part it is the only one I'd describe as "reliable". However, if you do it too many times you run the risk of being handed [The Price of Oblivion]. As a speedrunner you cannot really afford big hits to your ARC like that, and it can hand it out several times for the same reason. So try to use other options when they're available.

Of course, this can all be made much easier by a Heart or Rage player. The game does a check right as you're talking to the quest-giving NPC to determine which quest you get. The function is weighted towards not giving the same quest every time, but you can overcome that by momentarily looking like you *really* need that quest. This level of control is generally beyond what you can accomplish by taking a deep breath and counting backwards from 10 (barring cheats like, say, getting stoned whenever you want an Apathy quest), but the Twin Patron Aspects of Blatant Cheating are more than up to the task.

Generally Heart will get you much more mileage when *getting* the quest while Rage is much better at *completing* the quest with the outcome you want. Heart can have nasty side effects if done wrong, though. Said effects generally *are* temporary but it takes time for your shiny to right itself, time which you do not want to wait around for, and it may tank your roleplay coefficient enough to require a bodyguard while you’re waiting (depending on your class of course). Still, if your heart player is sloppy enough to make a mistake they'll probably make it even worse if they try to fix it, so you should really just take your licks before they mess it up so badly it *will* stay that way. <Yeah, no. A guy who’s unqualified to make emotion-level tweaks is going to be just as unqualified to fix them, but you pretty much have to be trying (or doing something completely outrageous) to make a mistake "stick".>

Finally, this section wouldn't be complete without a brief mention of undoing maturity effects with Heart. Basically, watch out. Unless you've got one of those weird Heart players who can look at your shiny before and after and then somehow flawlessly return you to "before", removing the effects of the maturity quests is all-or-nothing. This is a valid way to force the reckoning. It is *not* something to do as soon as you've woken the Denizen on a Full run. In either case, though, do consider the effect the maturity quests had on your ARC. If they're giving you a large positive effect, you should find another option for forcing the Reckoning rather than take that away right before the final battle. If one of your players wound up taking a lot of ARC hits during the maturity quests, though, you might actually be better off removing it as soon as you're allowed and just making progress faster on the rest of your quests to make up for it. That is one area where speedrunners have it much better than others; you could remove the maturity from half your players and still have time before the reckoning. <Orrrrr, you could just level up a couple times and not have to worry about it. Duh.>

<...>

<Well, that's it for the section on Maturity quests. Assuming he has his facts straight, I do have to admit I learned a thing or two here, and assuming he’s actually succeeded at any of what he just described I’m forced to raise my impression of his competence a few notches. I'm going to consider both of those things to be very Bad Signs.>


End file.
